When the Orange Prize was set up, ten years ago, I remember being called up by some newspaper and asked to attack it. I was tempted. Why, after all, should novels be treated as a special case if their author possesses a vagina? Isn’t the creation of fiction above matters of gender? Since then, my own views have changed, as has the literary scene. I no longer believe that women’s fiction is reviewed fairly – where it is reviewed at all – and the Orange has persistently picked out serious women writers of real quality who would never get short-listed for the Booker or Whitbread due to the endemic shortcomings of how those prizes get judged.

Lionel Shriver is a case in point. As an American living in London she presumably faces some of the extra disadvantages of fellow-expatriates such as the short story writer, Rachel Ingalls. Like Ingalls, she was published by Faber, in the days when it was still run by editors not accountants. Her fifth novel, Game Control, was one of the best works of fiction about Africa I’ve ever read, but it sold about 300 copies and is now out of print. That is not likely to happen to her seventh, We Need to Talk About Kevin. A best-seller in America, its coverage here has been minimal. Yet it is one of the most striking works of fiction to be published this year.

The novel is recounted in a series of letters from Eva to her husband Franklin. Their teenaged son, Kevin, has committed a Columbine-style mass-murder of several of his class-mates. Eva, now living alone, is being sued as a bad mother by the mother of one of the victims (something that litigation-mad Americans have in fact attempted). Her letters recount how the mature bliss of their marriage disintegrates on the arrival of the infant incubus that is Kevin. Part of the pleasure of the novel is the fiendish wit with which Shriver explodes every myth of motherhood, ruthlessly exposing the mind-bending tedium, ingratitude and hypocrisy that intelligent professional women struggle with, even without a Kevin. Amis’s monstrous Marmaduke in London Fields has nothing on this kid, who screams, bites, terrifies and keeps his nanny for a year only because she is an Irish Catholic who believes he is her penance. Eva is then forced to give up the job she loves as a travel writer, moved to the suburbs and does her best to raise her unlovable, manipulative, delinquent son. It is Desperate Housewives as written by Euripides.

Part of the tension of Shriver’s tale comes from the tragedy of a marriage to a stupid, good-hearted Republican husband who can only see the American dream of fatherhood. As a political satire on the way the family is promoted as the opium of the people, it is the blackest of black comedies. The epistolary nature of its narrative jumps rather too quickly from Kevin’s babyhood to his adolescence, (these being, of course, the two most harrowing times for parents,) but springs a dramatic twist on us as a result. Eva is an unreliable narrator, and scrutiny of the crimes she allots to her son reveal that she insistently believes the worst of him. Did he really blind his sister, the daughter Eva loves, or was it just an accident? Should a nursery-school child really be seen as calculating and clever? Searingly witty, seemingly honest, Eva is a seething mass of snobbery and hate, cooing to the infant:

“Mummy was happy before widdle Kevin came awong, you know that, don’t you? And now Mummy wakes up every day and wishes she were in France. Mummy’s life sucks now, doesn’t Mummy’s life suck? Do you know that there are some days Mummy would rather be dead?”

There can be few parents who have not felt this way, if only for a minute, about their child, and the ultimate twist in the knife is that Eva does learn to love, when it’s too late. Like Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work, this is an account of what it must be like to become a mother while having no talent for motherhood, but it is also a powerful, gripping and original meditation on evil – a novel that only a woman writer could have written but one that, in this country, has come too close to being ignored.

The New Statesman, May 2005

[The following week, Lionel Shriver won the 2005 Orange Prize.]